Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (40 page)

The nineteen-year-old prospect did not perform well in the field at the tryout. “He ducked away from hot grounders at shortstop,” said one sportswriter. “They put him in the outfield, and his wild pegs home, or what was intended for the plate, would have discouraged a lot of people.” But not Branch Rickey Jr., the son of the Dodgers’ general manager and someone whose views commanded considerable respect in the club’s front office. “I went overboard on Hodges,” the younger Rickey later recalled, “after I had seen him hit a few a country mile.”

The general manager’s son took Gil to a hotel in New York City and told him to report to the Dodgers’ offices in Brooklyn the next day. It may have seemed like a simple request to Branch Rickey Jr., but this was Gil Hodges’ first visit to the Big Apple. “Being a country boy,” he later remembered, “I was ashamed to ask for directions, and I got lost. It took me half a day to get to Brooklyn.” When he finally arrived, Branch Rickey Jr. offered Gil a contract with a $1,500 bonus—$750 to be paid on signing and the remaining $750 to be paid when he returned from the service (because Hodges was already scheduled to join the marines after the season). After discussing the offer with his father, Gil told Rickey that he would accept the contract, and on September 6, 1943, Gil Hodges became a Brooklyn Dodger.

Gil stayed with the club throughout the month of September, and on the last day of the season, manager Leo Durocher decided to give all the younger players a chance to be in a game. Although Gil had been a shortstop in high school and college, Durocher installed him at third base. The new position did not sit well with Hodges. He made two errors in the field that allowed two runs to score, and those costly miscues were not offset by his batting performance. In his first chance at the plate against Cincinnati Reds pitcher Johnny Vander Meer, Gil looked at a called third strike. He struck out swinging in his next appearance, and in his last effort he was able to draw a walk (and then steal a base).

The young player returned to Petersburg filled with disappointment. In his mind, he had squandered an opportunity to impress Durocher, and he could not help but wonder whether the Dodgers would take him back when he returned from military service. As always, Gil took his concerns to his father, and, as before, Charlie was able to give his son the confidence he needed.

The inspiration was not entirely a matter of logic. Charlie Hodges was a devout Catholic, and, not surprisingly, it was a perspective that stayed with Gil throughout his life. “Yes,” Joan Hodges later told me, “he was religious.” Years later, long after his father had died, Gil would pay homage to his father’s religious teachings. “I prayed the way my father taught us,” he explained. “Before each game, I would ask God not to let anyone get hurt and to remember those I love, to give us good health, and forgive us our mistakes.” With that perspective, Gil found considerable comfort in his father’s simple but definitive response to his second son’s misgivings about his future with the Dodgers. “There will,” said the senior Hodges, “be more baseball for you.”

In the meantime, Gil endured boot camp with the marines in San Diego before being shipped out to Pearl Harbor in 1944 with the 16th Antiaircraft Battalion. From there he was sent to Tinian in the South Pacific and ultimately to the grueling campaign in Okinawa. When he returned to Petersburg in early 1946, Gil was a sergeant with a bronze star “for heroic or meritorious achievement.” Never, however, would he discuss his wartime experiences—not even with Joan. (“Gil just wasn’t that way,” she later explained.) Joan did not even know about her husband’s bronze star until a sportswriter mentioned it to her in conjunction with a story he was preparing three years after she and Gil had been married.

Although he returned from the war unscathed, there was one long-term cost to Hodges’ military service: cigarettes. He lit one on his first day home, much to the surprise of his father. “Since when are you smoking?” Charlie asked his son. “Well,” came the response, “sitting around in those holes out in Okinawa and those other islands, I had to have something to do.” Charlie said nothing, and Gil Hodges continued to indulge a habit of smoking between one and two packs of cigarettes a day.

Gil’s prospects for a baseball career did not appear to be bright when he reported for spring training at Sanford, Florida, in 1946. No one was sure what position he should play. “He tried me out everywhere,” Hodges later said of Branch Rickey’s efforts. “He told me he was trying to find a minor league manager who would take me, but he wasn’t able to tell ’em what position I could play.” Jake Pitler, the manager of the Newport News, Virginia, farm team in the Class C Piedmont League, finally agreed to take the marine veteran and make him the team’s catcher. It was a new position for Hodges, and he was not sure that he could succeed as a catcher. His father tried to allay those concerns. “God is giving you the opportunity,” Charlie told his son. “Who are you to walk away from it?”

Gil Hodges was not one to disagree with his father, and Charlie no doubt felt a sense of vindication when the 1946 season concluded. His son had learned to handle the new position and, beyond that, confirmed the belief of Branch Rickey Jr. that the Princeton native could become a professional baseball player. Hodges hit .278 with eight home runs—an impressive accomplishment in light of the dead balls used in the league. With that success, Gil Hodges found himself with an invitation to join the Dodgers for spring training in Cuba in 1947.

He did well enough to become the third-string catcher behind Bruce Edwards and Bobby Bragan, but it was not a situation that enabled him to see much play. He caught only twenty-four games in the 1947 season, had only seventy-seven plate appearances, and batted a meager .156 with just one home run.

The situation was vastly different when Hodges joined the team for spring training in the Dominican Republic in 1948. Durocher attributed Hodges’ poor performance at the plate in 1947 to an inability to hit curveballs. He therefore had Cookie Lavagetto, one of the team’s senior players, give the Indiana native some needed instruction. (“One thing Cookie has taught me,” Hodges told a sportswriter during spring training, “is to relax up at the plate.”)

The benefits of Lavagetto’s instruction were evident in Gil’s improved performance at the plate. “Hodges is the talk of the Dodgers’ camp,” one sportswriter observed toward the end of March. “He has been by far the team’s best hitter in exhibition games.” Durocher was equally impressed. “The boy was weak on curveballs last year,” the manager told
The Sporting News
, “but I asked Manager Clay Hopper to instruct his Montreal pitchers to throw Gil plenty of curves, and Hodges has been whacking ’em.” There thus seemed little doubt that the Dodgers would keep Hodges on the team—if they could figure out where to play him.

Bragan had been traded away and Edwards had a sore arm—all of which should have provided an opening for the newly minted catcher. But Roy Campanella was now available—until Rickey informed Durocher that the Negro league star would be starting the season with the club’s Minneapolis farm team to break the color barrier in the American Association. And so—for the moment at least—Hodges became the team’s regular catcher. But he knew all about Campanella’s considerable skills, and he did not harbor any hope that he would remain at the position when Campanella made his inevitable return to the parent club. “I was more than a little confused,” Hodges later confessed, “about what was going to happen to me.”

Fate then intervened. Durocher had initially slated Preston Ward, a twenty-one-year-old rookie from Missouri, to be the team’s first baseman. But Ward started to falter at the plate as the season progressed, and Durocher was not happy. In late May, the Dodger manager approached Hodges and, without fanfare or explanation, simply said, “Son, if I were you, I’d buy a first baseman’s glove and start working out around there.” It was all the advice Gil Hodges needed.

He spent hour after hour doing drills and trying to learn the mechanics of the new position, and that practice soon paid dividends. On June 29, 1948, only days before Campanella made his return to Brooklyn, Hodges started a game at first base. He fared well enough to continue, but the transition was not easy. “I’d never played the position before, or even practiced at it,” he told one sportswriter in July, “and I had a time getting my bearings.” But he continued to work at it, and within one year he was gaining recognition as an accomplished fielder. “There’s little doubt,” said one sportswriter in September 1949, “that Gil is the best first baseman in the league.” (Hodges did have one glaring weakness—pop flies. For whatever reason, he had difficulty in judging the ball’s flight, and he soon entered into an arrangement with Jackie Robinson, who was then covering second base, to pay him five dollars for every pop fly Robinson caught near first base. But then there was the time during the 1952 World Series when Robinson caught a pop fly near Hodges. Buzzie Bavasi, watching events from the stands, noticed that the two players became engaged in a heated argument as they were walking off the field. The Dodger general manager was not happy, and he called the two players into his office before the next day’s game. “What’s going on?” he bluntly asked. “You embarrassed the club. You embarrassed each other.” Hodges then explained that Robinson told him he wanted ten dollars for the catch because it was in a World Series, and Hodges refused, saying that Robinson’s demand was unfair. “How did you settle it?” Bavasi asked. “I gave him seven dollars and fifty cents,” Hodges replied.)

Some attributed Gil’s success at first base to his large hands and his ability to stretch his long body out from the bag to catch throws that might be too short or off the mark. But another factor was Hodges’ relationship with the umpires. Never would he argue with the umpire about a bad call in the field or behind the plate. In Gil’s mind, it was a matter of respect for authority. “It’s the way I’ve been brought up,” he explained. (Years later, when Hodges was playing for the Mets, Rod Kanehl, one of the younger players, referred to his father as “my old man.” Gil pulled Kanehl aside and said, “Rod, when you’re around me, never refer to your father as your ‘old man.’ Always refer to him as your father.”) It was a perspective foreign to the thinking of most managers, including Charlie Dressen (who assumed Brooklyn’s managerial reins in 1951).

A man with an explosive temper, Dressen could not understand why his first baseman would not challenge an umpire’s bad decision. The new manager urged, pleaded, and cajoled—all without success in getting Hodges to change his ways. (There was the time when plate umpire Tom Gorman called Hodges out on a third strike with a pitch that appeared to be low. When Gil returned to the dugout, Dressen was on him immediately. “He’s taking the bat right out of your hands,” said the manager. After an unrelenting torrent of similar exhortations, Hodges finally yielded. “Okay! Okay! Okay!” he told his manager. “The next time I’m up, I won’t even ask Tom how his kids and wife are.”)

However much it may have frustrated his managers, Hodges’ respect for umpires appeared to have incidental benefits. “He was kind of buying into the feeling,” said Carl Erskine, “that he was going to get the close ones if he didn’t give the umpire a hard time.” And there were in fact occasions when Hodges—stretched to the limit in trying to catch a ball thrown by one of the Dodger infielders—would sometimes get the out call from the umpire even though his right foot had been pulled off the bag. (The most notorious incident was the play in the tenth inning of the fifth game of the 1952 World Series. Yankee pinch hitter Johnny Sain hit a slow roller that was fielded by Robinson at second base, but the throw to first was late and short. Although later photographs showed that Sain arrived at the bag before the ball and that Hodges’ right foot was off the bag when he made the catch, umpire Art Passarella called Sain out. A Yankee rally was doused before it started, and the Dodgers went on to win the game 6-5 in eleven innings.) The benefits that accrued from Hodges’ respect for the umpires did not go unnoticed by the opponents’ managers. “That guy steals two outs every game,” Phillies manager Mayo Smith complained.

Opposing managers were equally dismayed by Hodges’ ability to win games with his bat. His performance in 1948 was not overwhelming—he had eleven home runs and drove in seventy runs but batted only .249. It all changed with the 1949 season—the first of seven consecutive years in which Hodges would be chosen for the National League’s All-Star squad. He hit twenty-three home runs (eighth in the league), drove in 115 runs (fourth in the league), and raised his batting average to .285.

Over the next six seasons, he continued to pound the ball with authority, hitting at least twenty-seven home runs each year (with a high of forty-two in 1954 and more than thirty home runs in five of those seasons). The batting barrage during that seven-year stretch included eleven grand-slam home runs—only one short of the National League record of twelve (which Hodges would eclipse before his retirement, leaving the game with fourteen). But home runs were only part of the story. Hodges had an ability to drive in runs that was matched by few other players. For those seven seasons between 1949 and 1955, Gil drove in more than a hundred runs, with a high of 130 in 1954. (Only the New York Giants’ Mel Ott, with a string of eight consecutive seasons with more than a hundred runs driven in, could boast a better record in the National League.)

That high level of consistency, coupled with a modest demeanor, made Gil Hodges a perennial favorite among Brooklyn fans—especially because, unlike many other players, he had made Brooklyn his permanent home from the beginning.

The decision to settle in Brooklyn was, in part at least, a reflection of Gil’s choice for a wife. He had met Joan Lombardi by accident during the 1948 season. She was working at Macy’s at the time, and a fellow employee asked if Joan could come by her house in Brooklyn one afternoon to help make miniature pizzas for her son’s birthday party. A native of Brooklyn herself, Joan was happy to oblige, but she had difficulty in hailing a cab to take her back to her parents’ home. The inability to find a cab proved to be a stroke of good fortune. Joan’s fellow employee had two boarders in her house—Gil Hodges and Eddie Miksis, a utility infielder with the Dodgers. “Gil and Eddie Miksis pulled up in a car,” Joan later remembered, “and of course Gil, being the gentleman he was, offered to take me home.”